


all gods are carnivorous

by simplyprologue



Category: The Newsroom (US TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Casual Deification of a Former Colleague and Lover, F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Kidnapping, Pre-Series, SHIT GETS WEIRD, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-03
Updated: 2017-09-03
Packaged: 2018-12-23 13:53:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11991177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplyprologue/pseuds/simplyprologue
Summary: There’s a lack of clarity that tethers them together, unasked questions that remain unanswered, and the terror of what ghost may be haunting them, unknown.Nearly seven months after she was captured by the Taliban, Will and Jim try to survive in the liminal space that MacKenzie has left behind. Whether she’s a mercurial goddess, a saint, or a just a woman they loved, they still can’t figure her out.





	all gods are carnivorous

**Author's Note:**

> *chucks into the ether*  
> *leaves*

It’s as clear a night as New York City can be, an inky sky filled with the possibility of stars as millions linger underneath, peering down the avenues to contemplate what might lie beyond the lights. Light carries on endlessly, a full eight minutes from the sun to the Earth, over the sloping curve of the horizon, heaven’s cupped palm over the globe. The city is a beacon, shining out from the skyscrapers to the flat stop of the waters of the bay.

One million particles of light, to one, reaching out over the whole of the Atlantic.

Candles burn down to puddles of wax, and are replaced.

Jim’s phone rings twenty-five minutes after the end of the show. Affording a scant glance to the unknown number on the screen, he braces himself, answers it, and puts it to his ear. “Harper,” he says. Less than five seconds later he ends the call, demeanor the same as it was before. Though his face is a mask of calm, his shoulders relax into momentary slopes of disappointment. He pays attention to the pen and legal pad in his hands.

Charlie, a glass of bourbon in his hand, leans in the doorway to Will’s office. His posture is enough of a pronouncement. “It’s getting strange, now.”

“They need something,” Jim says, unperturbed in his note taking.

“Do they, or do you?” He looks at them as if they might be two students, two wayward boys. Because they are, is the best reason he can think of. “They didn’t know her. You two are the only ones here who really knew her.”

Will hums. “You knew her, Charlie.”

“I met her a few times. And I’m not saying she wasn’t a nice gal, the best damn EP in the business, more talented than you two knuckleheads put together, but—”

“It’s good for morale,” Jim says.

“It’s morbid, and an HR disaster waiting to happen.” Which is something to be said of almost anything in the _News Night_ bullpen, but none are so tangible and semi-permanent as the shrine that’s been built in bits and pieces, jumps and starts, in the editing bay. “Someone’s gonna break the media blackout, write a thinkpiece, and then we’re really gonna go to the zoo.”

Will scoffs, spinning his chair lethargically. “It’s a memorial with a few candles.”

Charlie points a stern finger at Jim. _“You_ stole a Peabody.”

“It’s _Mac’s_ Peabody. And I didn’t… steal it,” Jim says. He tears off the front page of his legal notepad, handing it to Will. “I just never returned it to her family. There’s a difference. Right, Will?”

“Jim has done nothing illegal.” Will crumples up the piece of paper he’s just been handed, tossing it carelessly behind him. It lands a half a foot or so from the trash bin. “As pertaining to the Peabody, which unlike many other awards does not have a clause stating that the medal must be returned in the event of the recipient’s death… Mac’s not dead. Jim is the Peabody’s custodian.” He sweeps his arm outwards, encompassing himself, Jim, and the beleaguered staff in the newsroom. “We are _all_ the Peabody’s custodian.”

“The staff is praying to it,” Charlie says drolly. It might be funny, if this wasn’t happening to him. Hope is a miserable drug, one that the body produces on its own accord, beyond all reasoning and logic. He’s seen Will at his highest highs, and doesn’t need to contemplate him at his lowest lows to know that should a body be found, a video uploaded, that this could end with an empty bottle of Vicodin and blue, vomit-crusted lips at the end of this Schrodinger's MacKenzie experiment these two are running. “I know it started out as some twisted sense of irreverent reverence, but I think it’s manifesting into it’s own religion now. People are asking for _intercessions_. And that’d be enough, but I’m worried about you two.”

“It’s been half a year, Charlie.” Will folds his arms across his chest, as petulant as ever. “Not even a year. And we don’t even know—”

“Mac’s not dead,” Jim says, flat. “She’s coming back.”

Believe something hard enough, and you just might will it into existence. There is a room full of people, a staff full of despairing kids, leaving prayers written on post-its and sacrifices, cold cups of coffee and magic pens. Everyone, looking for a break.

And two men, afraid the woman they love might be, just might be, no longer breathing.

The truth would be its own burden, it’s own immense form of suffering. What is more bearable - knowing, or not knowing?

So Jim and Will choose to live in the liminal space that they’ve allowed others to build around MacKenzie’s absence. And, Charlie suspects, getting absolutely wasted together on their nights off.

“What?” Will asks, scowling.

“What?”

“You want to say something.”

“I do. But I won’t.” Charlie takes a swig of bourbon, then a second, finishing the glass. With distinction, he sets it down atop Will’s shelf. “You’re right, it’s only been months, we don’t know anything, and MacKenzie’s gotten herself out of scrapes before.”

Jim taps his pen against the underside of his chin, smearing blue ink on his neck. “Damn right she has.”

“Just move it out of the editing bay, it’s a fire hazard and the morning shows have complained.”

“Never,” Jim answers, as politely as he deigns to be.  

Then at least he can say that he tried. He shrugs. “All right.”

“Fuck off.” Will, says, infinitely less polite. Standing, he opens his desk drawer, reaching for a pack of Marlboros and his lighter. It is not an invitation. “Junior, if you need me, don’t. I need a cigarette.”

“This is your office,” Jim points out.

“Yeah, and I don’t wanna be around either of you anymore,” he mutters, extracting a cigarette from the box and wedging it between his lips. With a darkened expression on his face he storms past Charlie, out of his office to sulk in better environs.  

“You two have been getting along better,” Charlie muses.

“He may be an agent of Satan, but his duties are largely ceremonial.”

He smiles. “You’re afraid Mac would strike you down.”

_Mac’s not dead._ Except when she is. Jim is haunted by her lost moments, her last moments, hears screams in his nightmares which have overwritten his memories, hardly accurate in the first place. Out of the two, Jim will be the first to reconcile himself with the fact, if it becomes fact, that Mac is dead.

His suffering is borne of a lesser guilt.

Lips reveal teeth, an almost-grin. “I am afraid Mac would strike me down.”

 

 

 

 

_One new voicemail, December 31, 2007, 8:37 PM._ “Happy New Year, Billy. In a few hours, for you. Wanted to call and say - say that I hope you can be happier, this year. Than last year. And that if you ever need me… yeah. I’m still here. That’s what I wanted to - and it’s not a threat, it’s a fact. That I’m just. I’m still here. Bye.” _End of message._

 

 

 

 

They have a passing acquaintance with sobriety. A strictly professional interest between the hours of eleven to nine, never meeting outside of working hours. For Jim, it’s the natural conclusion to moonshine in battered water bottles, for Will it’s bloodborne coping mechanisms he learned at his father’s knee. They pass a joint and half a bottle of Jack between them. They speak, because there is a silence to be filled.

If they stopped, they might breathe, might feel their hearts beating. The world might slow, and remind them of the pain they carry, the tremendous fear. They continue like spinning tops, whirligigs of nervous energy and distraction.

“What was it Mac used to say?” Will asks, leaning back against front of the couch, unfolding his long legs to fit under his coffee table.

Jim pauses the bottle’s ascent to his lips.

“You’ll have to be more specific.”

“It was her annoying thing. I hated it.” Head lolling back against the couch cushions, Will brings the joint to his lips, the end an ember flaring in the relative darkness.

He passes it to Jim, who takes a drag. “Again. More specific.”

They pass it between them quietly, burning it down the quick. Will’s loft has high ceilings, could never reek of pot, and even if it did he’s positioned in life that no one would care. The wealth and power of ACN’s poster boy are proven in what follows: the fact that Will McAvoy should be in an inpatient facility somewhere is perhaps the second worst-kept secret in broadcast journalism, but there’s no one who can’t be paid or coerced to whisper about what they might otherwise print.

The first worst-kept secret in broadcast journalism: Will McAvoy is still fucked up about MacKenzie McHale. It is barely a secret at all, but something referenced in hushed tones to keep a veneer of politeness about watching a man die slowly on television.

Jim tells himself he spends his nights like this to assure himself that Will isn’t doing lines off his kitchen counter, or if he is, he isn’t doing it alone.

Squinting, Jim lets his head feel like it’s floating feet above his shoulders, thinking of Mac tucking a yellow flower into the rim of his helmet, dirt speckling her cheeks and neck. “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, old time is still a-flying; and this same flower - this same flower…”

“This same flower which smiles today tomorrow will be dying.”

“See, you knew the annoying thing.”

Will smirks, tamping the joint out on the ashtray.

“Why?”

“Maggie dumped Don again. Or Don dumped Maggie again,” he says with a flippant hand gesture. “I think it depends on who’s telling it.”

“No.”

The smirk grows wider. “Then not be coy, but use your time and while ye may, go marry.”

“You knew it, you jackass.”

“Of course I did.”

 

 

 

 

There’s a guest bedroom in Will’s apartment, but Jim doesn’t use it. (He sleeps on the couch, wrapped in a duvet stolen from the linen closet where it will return in the morning, more crumpled than folded.) It feels committal, like a place to take up residence, like he and Will are friends. They’re not. There’s a lack of clarity that tethers them together, unasked questions that remain unanswered, and the terror of what ghost may be haunting them, unknown.

Jim dreams of Mac, violent etudes to a friendship ripped from his hands. Some nights she’s an angel, wings dripping with blood as her pallid face looks towards a blazing sun. Some nights, a corpse, mouth sewn shut, laid across dark stones as blood seeps from her eyes and ears. Some nights she is almost alive, not a thing caught between the living and the dead: those nights are the worst of them all.

Will does not dream of MacKenzie. She is lost to him, even in his sleep.

 

 

 

 

_He will have little memory of this in the days, weeks, months to come. It’s a function of the brain protecting itself, letting traumatic memories flow like water through a steel sieve. Vague imprints will remain, like the smell of electric fire, the feel of ragged steel pressing against his back, the creak of the trees in the wind._

_“Where’s Mac?” he asks, words slurring together. The medics, stony-faced and silent, strap him to a backboard. One puts something in his IV that makes his hand burn where the needle is taped to his skin. “Where’s Mac?”_

_There’s a neck brace keeping his chin in place, but he fights it._

_“Mac?” his voice warbles, but her name is like a prayer. “Wheresmac? Please - not gone.”_

_The Marine CSAR crew sent out from ISAF Kunduz carry him out of the wreckage, from the mouth of the warped and smoking Chinook to out under a blanket of stars, waning against the rose gold of dawn. He cranes his head in small measures, counting bodies on boards, grey woolen blankets wrapped around seated figures, blurry and distant. Blinking in the distortion, he lifts his hands to his face, looks at the fingernails missing from his right hand._

_She let go. Mac let go._

_“No, keep your arms down,” a medic tells him. “Your shoulder, buddy.”_

_Blood, warm and wet, soaks through the bandage on his arm. The pain is dull, locked behind a door. Wheresmac? It repeats in his head, over and over, like a coin flipping in someone’s fingers, a clever trick, a dexterity exercise. Heads, gone. Tails, not gone._

_Wheresmac?_

_Notgone._

 

 

 

 

_One new voicemail, February 26, 2008, 5:44 AM._ “It’s my birthday so I’m letting myself call you. I didn’t expect you - I knew you were going to let me go to voicemail, I know what time it is. And that’s - that’s okay. I just really wanted to hear your voice, Billy. So I called. Your voicemail is kind of the same thing. I’m thirty-six, so I’m officially old like you. I don’t - I don’t know if you’re still there. But I think I deserve that. Anyway. I just wanted to hear your voice.” _End of message._

 

 

 

 

“George Tiller,” Maggie suggests.

Jim taps his uncapped pen against his chin, smearing lines of blue ink onto his face. The fact that he’s barely slept shows in his eyes, ringed with the lines of exhaustion. “Yes.”

“Scott Roeder is an extremist, beyond his anti-abortion views,” she reads off her notebook. “The Anti-Defamation League has released that he was also a member of the Sovereign Citizen movement. Anti-government extremism cross-pollinated with anti-abortion extremism. Ends with him shooting a man in the head during a church service.”

“Assassinating a man during a church service,” Will says, putting his feet up on the table.

Jim doesn’t turn around, continuing to stare at the rundown pinned up on the board at the front of the conference room. “You’ll get pushback if you call it that.”

“Why? Because people don’t like to admit that the pro-life movement isn’t always centered on being, you know, pro-life?” Will scrubs a hand over his face; he hasn’t slept since the late eighties, and on days like this, it shows. It never stops them from getting wasted on a Sunday night, or any night of the week, really. If it’s not weed or coke or liquor, it’s something else keeping them awake. Misery gives them carte blanche to indulge. “Somehow to these kinds of people, their simple solution to a complex problem is to kill someone and call it justified. There are no simple solutions, but that’s beyond their tiny brains. Like other abstract concepts, such as compassion and relativism.”

“I was going to say because you’re personally against abortion and people are going to call you a pontificating hypocrite, but that too,” Jim drolls.

“Then who better to say it but me?”

“All right then.”

He can’t help but think that Mac would be eager to hear Will concede the moral low ground, for once.

“Tiller had been wearing a bulletproof vest since 1998 as he had every day since the FBI told him he was a target to anti-abortion militants, and any respectable prosecutor would be looking to find a way to implicate David Leach as an accessory,” he continues, taking _pontificating_ as a suggestion. Will has rarely ever had a problem being exactly what people accuse him of.

“Do _you_ want to have to wear body armor, Will?” Gary asks.

In his back pocket, Jim’s phone rings. His ringtone is _Carry On My Wayward Son,_ for now, at least, until Maggie or Tess or Tamara decide to change it again. He doesn’t bother changing his password. They’ll just crack it again. Though he does yearn for the days of _Hotel California_ and _Don’t Stop Me Now._

“His head’s a big enough target, not worth the investment,” Jim mutters, bringing his phone to his ear. “Harper.”

There is a moment, just a single one. The staff stops talking, eyes flickering to him.

“Hello, Mr. Harper,” an unfamiliar voice says, and his stomach roils. It does with every phone call, less so now that his phone isn’t set on the default ringer. But still he braces for impact, his brain jarring back into the few seconds before the engine blew out of the CH-47, his shoulder giving him a pre-emptive twinge. _I’m calling from the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center on behalf of the United States Marine Corps,_ a traitorous voice supplies.

“My name is Jenny Shields and I’m calling from Choose Energy, which can help lower your gas and electric—”

_Because you are listed as the emergency contact of MacKenzie McHale and medical next of kin._

“No thanks.”

_Click._

The moment passes, folded neatly back into the conversation as if it never occurred. Pocketing his phone, Jim approaches the board. “I want Tiller in the B-block. Kendra, can you get someone from the Kansas DOJ to be available for an interview?”

Will folds his arms across his chest, blonde hair curling over his forehead. He looks almost petulant, lips quirking into what could be a grin, could be displeasure. There is a grimness to his hope, that it is to never be acknowledged at all, never spoken of. He’s near-pathological in his duality, in his denial of any potential of Mac’s return and his avoidance of even the hallway where the altar resides. In his facetious defenses of its continual existence and daily scorn of those who frequent it.

Jim envies Will’s capacity for great love, but not his capacity for enduring hatred.

The staff exhales back into routine. The eleven o’clock rundown continues with no lapse in productivity.

 

 

 

 

If the Wichita Police Department replies to her with comment by broadcast it will be a miracle, and in Maggie’s experience, miracles must be prayed for. The altar is abandoned this time of day, the early afternoon lull when most of the staff is busy eating their lunches at their desks with one hand and plucking out copy on their keyboards with the other.

“Please,” she mutters, picking up the lighter. “I really need this.”

She needs to not be Will’s assistant anymore, she needs to prove to Don (who is still mad that Jim got the EP position, who is mad that she’s not mad enough for him) that she’s more than fetching coffee and fielding incoming calls and making Will’s appointments, she needs to prove to her parents that New York wasn’t a mistake, she _needs_ to make it. Exhaling through pursed lips, she kneels in front of the dented metal file cabinet saved from the junk pile.

“What would you do?” she asks. “You did it. What would you do?”

Pictures of Mac, warped and crinkled from their tenure stuffed in the bottom of Jim’s work bag, stare down at her, silent. Who is she, sitting by the fire, mystery and mirth glowing in her eyes? Who is she, head tipped back against the charred facade of a crumbling building, falling asleep in destruction? Who is she, arms aloft in victory, wrapped in a flak jacket and camouflage? Who is she, smiling enigmatically from behind a tin cup full of coffee? Maggie lights a candle, tending to the homefire, thinks of Neal who tends to Mac’s Wikipedia page, erasing any mention of her capture, tracking down whoever is behind the edits, immediately reporting any mention of it on right-wing blogs and careless news sites. Mac’s disappearance is no secret, but it is never spoken of to outsiders. Reverence and remembrance of Mac belongs to journalists alone.

_Comment from the Wichita PD,_ she scribbles on a post-it note. Small pieces of paper in pastel yellow and blue and pink climb the wall like ivy, the corners of individual sheets curling away from the plaster as the adhesive dries, giving them the appearance of leaves. She adds hers near the top, sealing it with the back of her fingernail.

_Let the footage file not corrupt,_ one says. _Reply from the White House,_ another. _Good booking from the Mayor’s office._

At the center of the altar sits the Peabody - _2008, “MacKenzie McHale: Covering Afghanistan.” CNN_ \- atop a stack of well-thumbed reference books. Their candles are a mix of cheap tea lights and thick columns of wax encased in glass, the kind available for purchase in any bodega in the city. There are other offerings, cold cups of coffee and favorite pens, stress balls, highlighters. Anything which might favor intercession.

“Anything?” she asks. “Because I’m out of ideas. We need something better than the crime angle, it’s the only one people are running with.”

Silence.

Mac’s only answer these days.

Who is Mac, besides a woman with a gun, standing as easily among Afghan militia as she did Marine Special Forces, but maybe a gun herself. If not always fearless, then brave, who asked for bravery from others. And failing that, too damn resourceful and determined for her own damn good.

“The assassination of George Tiller,” Maggie says, testing Will’s words out in her mouth. “And the other men and women who go to work everyday knowing it makes them a target. We’re going to spend a minute thirty talking about what Roeder believed. How many late term abortion providers are left, now, who walk around with the same target on their back? And will any of them be willing to go on live television tonight? ”

Four, it turns out, after she Googles it on her phone. She only needs one.

Staggering to her feet, she bolts out of the editing bay.

Then peeks her head back in.

“Thanks, Mac.”

 

 

 

 

It’s not strange for Jim to be summoned to Charlie’s office in the middle of the day. It happens with a degree of regularity that begets normalcy, even if the topics broached behind the closed door cannot be strictly classified as normal. But the whole arrangement - Will, remaining as the face of ACN with his slow, contained, spiral, Jim, the youngest EP in the business with a markedly inexperienced staff and Charlie, the alcoholic glue keeping them together - is an exercise in the absurd, so Jim takes Charlie’s midafternoon bourbon-soaked lectures in stride.

Which means he sits uncomfortably in one of the chairs in front of Charlie’s desk, praying for an aneurysm.

“I was in the Hỏa Lò Prison,” he says, tipping the last sips of a tumbler into his mouth.

“Hanoi Hilton?”

“Yes.”

One corner of Jim’s mouth lifts. “Just now?”

“In 1971.” Charlie places the glass on his blotter and sits in his desk chair, lacing his fingers together over his stomach. “I was embedded with the 144th Artillery for UPI when we were captured not far out of Da Nang. The local militia was under orders not to kill American troops, so we were handed over to the authorities.” He lets that sit for a moment. “The isolation was the worst, not being able to reach out and touch another human life. You lose faith in your own humanity. But at night, lying in the dark cell, I could hear the other men knocking. Tapping. _I’m still here._ It was code taught in Marine Survival School. I never learned it, but I’d imagine they were talking about their sweethearts, or Shakespeare, or the news. There were men who’d been in there so long they didn’t know we’d put a man on the moon.”[1]

Some days, Jim feels so much hope that he chokes on it. It sits on his chest when he tries to fall asleep at night, suffocating him. It will drive him to madness.

“Charlie…”

“I’m not done.” He holds up a hand. “The _moon._ We had reached out and touched the floor of heaven in the time some of these men had been held as POWs.”

Jim sighs. “How long were you there?”

“Eighteen months. You know why I survived?” Charlie asks.

“Why?”

Pulling at his tie, Jim shifts in his seat. He expects to hear a tale of camaraderie, of friendship and toil. The ancient history of brave men who fought to live for their loved ones back home, who crawled through miles of shit to make it to their wives’ front doors. A story of the daily fight and painful grind, days marked down on the walls of a cell.

Charlie blinks.

“Because I just decided to,” he says, mouth folding into a grim smile. “Mac decided a long time ago whether or not she was gonna make it out alive. It has nothing to do with you, or Will, or anyone else and everything to do with what she’s accepted as the cost of her survival.”

“The Taliban isn’t the NVA, Charlie.”

Mac might not have a choice.

He barks a laugh. “And I drink everyday to forget that it could have been the Vietcong. I know plenty of people who disappeared along Highway One who were never found. Leona was almost one of them.”

“What happened?”

Charlie stands, rounding his desk to his bar cart, empty glass in hand with the intention to refill it.

“I asked her not to go,” he answers, filling his tumbler with another triple before pouring Jim his own glass, pressing it into his hand when he tries to tacitly refuse.

Jim has _rules_ that keep his problem from becoming a _problem_ and not drinking before the show airs is one of them. Still, he considers the glass cradled between his reluctant palms, and reasons it's leagues better than the swill that burns the back of his throat most nights. Charlie has the means to drink to get drunk with _style._ Jim tosses it back, warmth blooming in his chest as he swallows a mouthful of Maker’s Mark.

“And she didn’t?”

The first half of Charlie’s answer is a coy grin. “She laughed in my face and told me to fuck off, then took a different assignment at the last minute. Which is the beginning and the end of the history of Leona Lansing ever listening to a word I’ve said.”

“How long did she cover the war?”

“She went back to the US a little after the 144th was captured. Her husband didn’t like the idea of an heiress being executed by the Khmer Rouge, and so Reese came clawing out of her nine months later.” That too, is a reason for Charlie to drink everyday. “She’d written me off as dead, and I’ve never let her forget it, either, just like she’s never let me forget the time I lost her son in Macy’s on Black Friday.”

Jim takes another sip of bourbon, feeling an almost-laugh bubble in his throat.

It fades like a glimmer.

“I think I’d feel it, if she was dead,” he says, speaking to the bottom of his drink. “Will thinks she’s dead.”

“Do not believe for one _minute_ Will understands what he thinks about Mac,” Charlie scoffs, jabbing a finger into the no man’s land between them over his desk. “I’m not all that convinced that you do, either.”

Jim is tired of hearing of what he thinks.

“What do _you_ think?”

“I think it doesn’t matter!” Charlie slams his drink down, bourbon precariously close to spilling. “What matters is that I have an anchor and an EP who are in a race to see who can self-destruct first. When you two first came to me six months ago with the proposal to revamp _News Night_ I thought, great. I can the right hand of the best of the business. Maybe these two boys can help each other keep it together until this thing comes to its natural conclusion. I didn’t count on you two shutting out every other living human being who knew and loved Mac all over the possession of an award.”

“It’s not just an award,” he says defensively.

Mac won _that award_ in the middle of Fallujah via satellite phone. That statue was the last good thing, elation worn on her face like a glowing morning son as she jumped on the air mattress at ten at night. They’d drunk rotgut until their heads spun, and slept in a heap in their quarters on the MEK Compound. She’d kissed him on the corner of his mouth, throwing her arms around his neck, and James Harper fell a little bit in love with MacKenzie McHale that night.

“Jim, you don’t need the Peabody to keep her alive,” Charlie beseeches him, eyes too kind. “You don’t need the offerings, the candles, the photos. If Mac is dead, she’s dead. She was a wonderful, brave, smart woman. If she’s alive, we’ll handle it. If she’s dead, we’ll handle that too. But return it to her family.”

Two years of friendship, and the truth is this:

“It’s all I have left of her, Charlie.”

His face softens, expression shifting to one of wizened sympathy.

“They can’t take the memories, kiddo.”

“I need to hold onto her.” Jim splays his right hand out on his thigh, looking down at the fingernails that still haven’t grown back, even after all these months. The burns, long-healed from the crash, crawl over his skin for a few seconds until the back of his hand is red and marred, skin weeping. Then he blinks, and it passes. “I couldn’t - I couldn’t hold onto her. I can’t let this one go. If she’s dead, she’s dead. But I need this one thing.”

“You’ve got Will.” Charlie’s voice is gentle.

“For how long?” Jim looks up, face pained. “You know it, I know it, the staff knows it. I know there’s an obit on file for when it happens.”

“We won’t let it get to that point.”

He huffs a short laugh. “We let Mac run away to Afghanistan. We, and I’m speaking of we as a unit, have not historically made good decisions about keeping people alive and safe.”

“Before you came to ACN, he was dead inside. That tabloid-ready smile did a good job at hiding it—”

Jim snorts.

“It really didn’t.”

Charlie looks at him in a way that makes him want to squirm away. “He feels like he has this obligation to you, like a big brother, because it’s what Mac would have wanted. Has he said that? No, but Will has the emotional capacity of a thimble. Trust me when I say that this is the best thing that could have happened to him, to have you and the rest of the youngsters to take care of.”

Shrinking down in his chair, Jim balls his hand up into a fist. “It really isn’t.”

“Trust me. I was with him when it broke on the wires that your helicopter went down.”

_Fuck._

On occasion - on every occasion, truly - Jim forgets that the night of the crash happened to other people, too. It happened to the McHales, to his parents and his sister, to Charlie and Will and everyone on this speck of dirt called Earth who knew someone on the Chinook. And when morning came, they knew what happened to everyone.

Except for Mac.

That morning didn’t just happen to him.

“Okay.”

“You have to be okay with not knowing,” Charlie says. “Life goes on. We report it every day on the news. Don’t forget that. You have to make peace with not knowing. It might be the only peace you get.”

 

 

 

 

_“Jesus Jim, are you really sleeping?”[2]_

_Her voice cuts through his light slumber. The seats in the back of the helo are benches of suspended red canvas and steel bar, neon yellow seat belts keeping them in place as they fly through the air at over a hundred knots - hardly good sleeping conditions, but Jim has learned to get his rest anytime, anywhere._

_“Resting my eyes,” he mumbles._

_“You should have slept last night.”_

_A weary smile ghosts across her face; neither of them has slept more than four hours at a time in twenty months, with the over-under set at a solid ninety minutes. The interior of a Chinook is friendlier accommodations than a cave at the Pakistan-Afghanistan border._

_“I had to get the school footage organized,” he says, yawning. “Did you sleep?”_

_“Shut up.”_

_That is a definite no._

_They hear the pilot’s voice in their headsets. “Hey, we’re approaching Sangin now. You said you’re looking for a compound, or something?”_

_“Yeah!” Mac shouts._

_“We can look, but we’re under strict orders not to linger on our way to Khost,” the co-pilot responds, leaning back out of his chair to look at them._

_She gives him a thumbs up, then cranes her neck to look out the window just behind her to her left. The view of the valley passes in a near blur, blue and green fringed mountains off in the distance. Sitting up, she looks at Jim. “We should record an intro while we’re up here. Production value?”_

_“Sure.”_

_He unzips the bag with the AV equipment where it’s buckled in next to him._

_“Audio’s gonna be shit,” she says, adjusting her headset to sit further back on her skull. “We’ll have to - woah! What the fuck?”_

_The Chinook takes a sudden dip to starboard, but quickly evens out._

_“Sorry ‘bout that,” the pilot says, “left panel’s a little soft, but we’re good.”_

_“Well, that was exciting.” Eyes widening, she gives him a toothy grin, then blows her bangs out of her face. “Get as much as the mountains behind me as you can.”_

_Jim hoists the camera into place, checking levels, then frames the shot away from any identifying information of the helo and the crew, capturing as much of the window as he can without cutting out Mac or making his arm feel like it’s going to fall off. He adjusts the white balance, sets it to record, and gives Mac the sign to start talking._

_Rolling her neck, she feels the vertebrae of her upper spine pop and release. Then, assuming the bland mask of a reporter, begins. “This is MacKenzie McHale reporting for CNN from the Helmand Province in Afghanistan. We’re flying in the valley of the Helmand River, heading towards Taliban-controlled Sangin, one of the central locations of the opium trade in Southern Afghanistan. Notorious? Notorious for?”_

_“I think we can assume notorious.”_

_“We’re flying in the valley of the Helmand River, heading towards Taliban-controlled Sangin, a small town of roughly fourteen thousand which is notorious for being one of the central locations of the opium trade in Southern Afghanistan. Widely regarded as one of the deadliest areas in the country—”_

_“Now you tell me,” he drawls._

_It’s never really a question of if they’re going to get shot at, just who’s going to be doing the shooting any given day._

_She ignores him. “They might play this before the interview with Corporal Weinmaster. If it falls in the first thirty we need to get the word deadliest in there. We should probably mention the IED attacks, too.” Pausing thoughtfully, she hoists herself higher into her seat, loosening her seat belt. “I’m gonna start over. Try to do an intro for the whole segment. Tell me when we’re good.”_

_He checks the shot._

_“Okay, you’re good.”_

_There’s no warning from the universe that this might be the last time he sees Mac. If there was, he might pay more attention to the viewfinder on the camera, the way her hair curled over her shoulders, the sardonic glint in her eyes. He might find more ways to remember her as more than a wisp of a woman, an ideal brought to life with a bleeding heart for ideology. But he doesn’t._

_The worst days of your life do not come escorted with black flags and a dark horizon._

_They just come._

_“Two weeks ago, in the small town of Sangin in the Helmand Province of Afghanistan—”_

_The anti-aircraft missile is a whistle in the wind, bringing a second or two of confusion before colliding with the helicopter mere feet from where Mac is strapped into her seat._

_“We’ve lost the engine - fuck, fuck, Jesus Christ!”_

 

 

 

 

He considers going home after the show. Swears to himself he will, as he walks Maggie down to Hang Chews, slides into a booth with them. ( _She’s good,_ he thinks, looking at her for too long. Maggie is good, and Mac would like her. He likes her, but can he convince himself this is worth it, breach the _if_ as wide as the ocean? He’s killed everything but his shame.) Plans on splitting a cab with Neal who lives uptown, put some of his EP money to use so that his friend doesn’t have to take the late night C to 145th Street - Jim lives less than ten blocks away, in Hell’s Kitchen, in Mac’s old apartment. He never knew her when she lived in it, took over the lease with the help of her parents’ solicitor when he first stumbled back to American shores, before… before he pissed them off, anyway.

Old Ned McHale only asked him for one thing, and he fucked it. But Jim reasons the anger would have come eventually, that no one can like the man who survived when their daughter died.

And all of Mac’s things are still in a storage unit on Amsterdam on the Upper West, and some days Jim wonders if he might guess the combination on the lock - if it’s still there. If her parents haven’t packed it all up and had it shipped to London. If they cut the lock or guessed the code or found it written down, somewhere. Not that it would be hard to guess, really, her birthday and then Will’s, because Mac was as careless with her possessions as she was with people’s hearts, so Jim haunts her old apartment, on the second floor of a walk-up on top of a Thai noodle place and a one block walk to Times Square. _Good real estate,_ her father told him over the phone, when he signed the place over. _She’d want you to have a safe place to live._ Would she? Did Mac really care about that? Safety, security, the promise of calm waters?

He fucking hates the place.

Not that he likes Will’s sterile apartment, or his barren office at ACN. It’s just easier, there. Will is more miserable than he is, and that makes it _easier_.

Jim staggers out a little after midnight, gripping Martin and Gary tight. Checks his phone, sees the date, and instead of going home, tells the driver to take him to Tribeca. Will’s doorman knows him, perhaps a little too well, greeting him with a bland _go on up, sir_ and during the twenty-something floor elevator ride Jim can’t stop thinking about the date, about combination locks, and how the last words real words - not terrified, not shouted over the combustion of the engine - he got to tell Mac were _okay, you’re good._

He finds Will on his balcony, sprawled out on a lounge chair, a cigarette in his hand and three more tamped out in the ash tray.

“You weren’t the only person who loved her,” Jim snarls, standing in the cool air of the early summer. The noise of the city looms hundreds of feet below them, quieted. “I loved her too. I would have followed her anywhere. I wish I’d never had met her. I spend every waking moment waiting for an mp4 of an ex-Mujahideen putting a bullet through her skull to appear in my inbox and it’s driving me _insane._ I wish she was dead. It would be easier.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Will says, not out of any real sense of surprise but with an tone of annoyance, as if this would have been entirely appropriate had he been given the opportunity to stretch beforehand, prepare in some way.

“You couldn’t forgive her. You still can’t! It’s why you’re so goddamn pissed all the motherfucking time. Because you just can’t get over it.”

He takes one last drag off his cigarette, then puts it out. “It’s not like she forgot our anniversary, she—”

But Jim’s had the benefit of already having had this fight in his head on the way over.

“She was still fucking her ex when you started dating. Yeah, I know the story, Will. Everyone does. I also know that she fell in love with you and that Brian Brenner is an emotionally manipulative piece of shit. Mac could be dead. What _the fuck_ does it matter now that she doesn’t past your litmus test for moral purity?”

Will stands, barefooted in his pajamas. His plans for the evening were to drink himself into a stupor and fall asleep outside, but he can go ten rounds with Jim. “You think I don’t know that it sounds fucking insane?”

“You never picked up the phone when she called.”

He considers, momentarily, asking Jim how he knows that, or flat-out denying it. But he also knows he has fewer recollections of his conversations with Jim than Jim has with him. He does not consider that Mac may have _told_ Jim that she was placing calls to her ex-boyfriend, or that he may have been present for some of them. This may be representative of many of Will’s flaws on the whole, a stubborn presumption that it is impossible for anyone to unlock what may be going on in his head at any given moment.

“She _cheated on me,”_ he says, brushing past him inside. Jim follows him, slamming the door behind them. “What? Just because she decided she needed to self-flagellate with the United States special forces I need to hold her hand?”

“She was terrified,” Jim seethes.

“She could have gone home,” Will counters, striding towards the kitchen. A drink, this fight needs a drink, because Will is going to have this fight with Jim, always has these fights with Jim, does not think about how he didn’t fight with Mac, just asked her to leave and shut the door behind her before blocking her number, boxing up her belongings, losing her apartment key - surgically excising her from his life with an emotional efficiency curated from decades of protecting himself and others. “She _should_ have gone home, instead of dragging you through the FATA region. You got shot in the ass!”

“I wanted to be there.”

He scoffs, pouring scotch into glass. “Then you’re just as dumb as she is, Skippy.”

“Do you know what happened, when the helo went down?”

A dark look simmers on Jim’s face - a challenge.

“No. Tell me.”

“The doors came off, and Mac started to fall out. And I grabbed her. I did. I was holding onto her. I could have done it. But she - she let go. I remember looking straight into her face, holding her to me. Then she let go. And she was gone. People shouldn’t be able to just not leave a trace _._ ” Jim reels, pressing the heels of his hands to his forehead. Then lowers them, balling them into fists at his sides. “Because… because she knew, I couldn’t hold on much longer. And she didn’t want me to have to be the one who - who let her go.”

Will stops, mid-sip, brow furrowing. Then chokes out a humorless laugh. “This isn’t about me, _you_ can’t forgive her. Life’s perfect little victim, James Harper.”

“I love her. Maybe not as much as you, but I love her,” Jim says, clenching and unclenching his fists. Unconsciously, Will thinks. Men like Jim don’t know how to be threatening on purpose, never had the right training. “I hate her for letting go.”

“She saved your life.”

An irrational pang of jealousy overtakes him, rearing up its head as a surge of uncontrolled fury - the simpleness to Jim’s grief. That to him, MacKenzie gets to die a hero, forever immortalized as the warrior who kept him alive. The woman who made the greatest sacrifice for a friend. There is no dissonance between the woman who he fell in love with, made him great, and then broke him into sharp fragments, a dangerous puzzle of broken pieces.

“I never asked her to do that,” he says, voice beginning to climb, eyes watering. _Fuck,_ Will thinks. He wants anger from Jim , not fucking _this._ “I just want my friend back, but she’s dead. She’s probably dead.”

“Yeah, that’s why you never changed your phone number. That’s why you pick up every goddamn phone call, day or night. Because Mac’s dead.”

“You didn’t pick up a single one,” Jim charges forward, and then reconsiders it. Stopping, placing his hands on the kitchen island counter, he shakes his head. Voice low, almost a growl, he asks, “How many voicemails did she leave you?”

Will blinks. “I don’t know.”

“Yes you do.”

“I don’t.”

He does.

“So you still haven’t listened to any of them?”

He hasn’t.

“It’s none of your business.”

“You should have picked up the damn phone, Will. Just once! It might have saved her life!” Jim shouts. “If she’s coming back, Mac’s not coming back as who she was when she left. That Mac’s never gonna call. You think I don’t know that?” Crumpling, he folds himself in half, carding his fingers through his hair. “You get to live to be mediocre for another day. Just a fifty year old man who never lived up to his potential because it’d be too uncomfortable. Too damn scary. Coward.”

“What are you doing hanging around here for, then?” he asks, finishing the scotch. The tumbler leaves his hand haphazardly on its way into the sink, clattering against the stainless steel basin and cracking.

He fights the urge to pick it up and throw it properly, make a mess.

“You’re all I’ve got left of her!” Jim keens. “Her Peabody and her waste of space ex-boyfriend.”

“Well, I’m not exactly thrilled I’m stuck with her lapdog and her glorified paperweight.” He needs a cigarette. _Fuck,_ does he need a cigarette. His pulse is knocking around in his head and he needs a cigarette, fishing a half-finished pack out the drawer where he stuffs the takeout menus and pulling his lighter out the pockets of his drawstring pants. “Jesus, why do you even stay? I’m fucking awful to you, I don’t listen, and one of these days my housekeeper is going to find me OD’d on my bathroom floor.”

He puts the cigarette between his lips, rolls the wheel and catches the ignition in the lighter with a _snick,_ and inhales slowly.

Lifting his head, Jim scowls, face pinching. “Why don’t you just go ahead and do it?”

“Do what?” Will asks, even though he knows. Takes another drag, waves the smoke away from his face.

“Chase that with a couple of Ambien and some Xanax and _call it._ ” First of all, Will thinks, that’s not how he’d do it if he was going to do it. Too much room for error. Jim continues, “Sure, it might kill Charlie but he’s up most nights anyway waiting for a phone call from an ER nurse telling him that you’ve blown it. It’d be hard at first, but we’d all move on. Charlie could learn to sleep at night. Someone would fill the eight o’clock spot, people might miss you at first but hey, you’re an asshole we all put up with. You’ve said it yourself, you’ve got the highest staff turnover at ACN. You hate your life. You want to be dead. So why not just fucking do it?”

For a few seconds, he considers the glowing end of the cigarette.

“You’d be out of a job.”

“So-the-fuck what?” Jim asks, pacing around his kitchen and living room like he’s looking for something to put his hands on. “You hate me and everything I stand for. You hate me for the sin of not being Mac. I hate myself too.”

Will barks an honest laugh.

“You think _you_ blame yourself for this? Buddy, your guilt is bush league. I was trained by professionals. I was blaming myself for everything wrong in my life by the time I was six years old. Self-loathing is a belief system I can buy into more easily than God.” It’s been awhile since he’s caught an honest beating from anyone, his early thirties, probably. The first Bush’s administration. _Just make it hurt,_ he thinks. So it can feel better when it stops. “If her parents would just give me the number the Taliban’s asking for - I’d pay it. Then I’d put a gun in my mouth.”  

It would finally stop.

Jim staggers away from him and then turns back around, jabbing his finger in Will’s face. “Because you _still_ can’t forgive her. For any of it.”

“She left,” he counters simply, lighting another cigarette off the end of the first one.

“You let her.”

Jim’s face is maybe a foot away from his.

“I sure did.”

He didn’t say anything when she offered to leave after telling him about Brian, or when she resigned from ACN. When she took the international position with CNN. When she called the first time, or the third, or sixteenth. After any of the emails, any of the letters and postcards. Silence was his weapon against her.

Better than hitting. It wasn’t hitting, or kicking, or dragging her across the living room by her hair while the children watched from the shadows, praying to fade into the wallpaper.

_“God.”_

Will rolls his eyes, breathing smoke out through his nostrils. “Would you just do it, you baby?”

“Do _what?_ ”

“Man up and hit me like you want to.”

Like _Will_ wants him to, so he would have something to point to in the mirror and say, _this is why it hurts._ Lessen the insanity, let the pain be real and not just the madness jangling about in his head. He has a hundred reasons to hurt about MacKenzie, he just needs _one_ to hurt about something else.

Jim shakes his head, walking in a shaky loop between the walls.

“You let them deify her because you can’t handle any of this,” he says, voice trembling. Eyes wide open, his face drains of color. “You can’t decide whether you want Mac to be dead or alive so you let us make her immortal. It’s easier for you. You don’t have to think about how she’s a real person, really getting tortured and starved down in some dark hole. Do you know what I would do to be able to hear her voice again? To listen to one new voicemail, read one new email? To hear her say she loves me? Will, I say this with all sincerity - fuck you.”

Will McAvoy has learned one lesson in life, over and over and over again: have nothing, so that you can’t lose everything.

“Get the fuck out of my apartment and get the fuck over yourself.”

 

 

 

 

_It’s a ten second clip, emailed to a CNN Vice President from a secure IP address one month after her capture. In it, her pallor is grey, her eyes dazed as she squints at someone behind the camera. Fluorescent light shining directly in her face catches beads of sweat on at her temples and on the Cupid’s bow of her upper lip. Her hair is covered by a yellowed scarf. And in those ten seconds, the funeral that the McHales had been planning turns into a recovery effort._

_“My name is MacKenzie Morgan McHale,” she says, voice catching.[3]_

_Very few people ever see this clip - senior CNN executives, MacKenzie’s family, a team of hostage negotiation experts, and a select group of government officials._

_“I’m a CNN producer. I need your help.”_

_The course of action is decided immediately: complete media blackout.[4]_ _There are at least forty major new agencies to convince, and dozens of high profile bloggers to reason with. Then smaller news outlets, like the Pajhwok Afghan Network who have no cause to stand down after citing local officials the day after the crash, have already reported MacKenzie missing. ACN, at least, they have hope for._

_If she becomes the international girl on the milk carton, they may never get her back. The stakes will only continue to rise and rise._

_On the screen, MacKenzie closes her eyes._

_“I’ve been here too long and I’ve been very sick and it’s terrifying here.”_

 

 

 

 

_One new voicemail, August 6, 2008, 7:14 AM._ “It’s been two years now. I should stop calling you, Will but I - I’m sorry. I’ll never stop loving you. I’ll always be here. Always. Goodbye, Will.” _End of message._

 

 

 

 

_They were invited to a memorial. The discovery that the woman being memorialized is, in fact, alive might have deterred some from going through with the event. But everyone here is taking advantage of the fact that every rumor, every semi-verified report, every bit of gossip about Mac’s kidnapping are, for at least a few hours, available conveniently in one place, passed around like hors d'oeuvres on platters by people looking for a feast._

_Jim stands in a corner of a dark parlor room filled with furniture so expensive he’s afraid to sit on it, holding his drink tightly in his hand, puzzling out the bottom of his cup. He doesn’t see Will enter the room, find him almost immediately, and make his way over._

_“You’re Jim Harper, right?”_

_He looks up. Shit._

_“Yeah.”_

_He considers walking away, but then thinks of the piece of yellow legal pad paper folded into inner pocket of his suit jacket. He sighs, lowering his drink, then places it on the shelf of the bookcase behind him._

_“I won’t pretend I don’t know who you are.”_

_“You were - you were in her letter. She wrote one for you too?” Will asks uncomfortably, hair half-combed and too long, adding to his state of disheveledness. His suit is clean and pressed, but the shirt underneath is wrinkled. Jim wonders why he’s here, if for no other reason than to be a spectacle. There isn’t a person at this gathering who doesn’t know about what happened between Will McAvoy and MacKenzie McHale, even if Jim himself only had his suspicions confirmed two weeks ago._

_Everyone in the unit had written them while they were waiting for their final transport in Kyrgyzstan, in-case-of-my-death-please-send letters. It was suggested, and he’d written them too, to his parents and his sister. He didn’t know that Mac had written one for him, in between cursing how many sisters she has, how they’d be mad if she didn’t write one for each of them individually. You’ll be dead, Mac, he said. Who cares?_

_“Yeah,” Jim answers shortly._

_You’ll be dead, except she’s not dead, and Jim hasn’t quite figured out how to breathe since he found out._

_“I’m surprised she thought ahead enough to write them.”_

_Jim lifts a single eyebrow, feeling a pang of hyper-protectiveness for Mac. “I’m surprised you actually read yours.”_

_Inclining his head, Will seems to concede._

_“The Ambassador won’t negotiate with terrorists. CNN won’t either. They have to lower the stakes for when they refuse to cooperate with any of the demands,” he mumbles instead, throwing back what Jim surmises is definitely not his first or second drink of the night. Considering Will’s size, maybe his fourth. “They really lucked out with the daughter of the fucking former British Ambassador to the United States, didn’t they?”_

_In this poorly-lit corner of the head of the ACN DC Bureau’s townhouse, he can see the tears hemmed at the corners of Will’s eyes. No, Jim thinks. Not allowed._

_“Thank you,” Jim mumbles. “For your work with - for making Green Little Footballs take their post down.”_

_“Because I’m the one who speaks Republican.” There’s a look on Will’s face that Jim can’t describe. If he knew him better, he would call it helplessness. “How are you holding up?”_

_“Why do you care?” he bites back. Then regrets it, forcing him to think of Mac’s words: I know you won’t like him, but look after him, if you can. If he’ll let you. Looking around the room, Jim knows Will is the only vaguely friend-shaped thing here. “Well, up until two days ago I thought they just couldn’t find her body during the search and recovery. Now… I don’t know what to think.”_

_He nods._

_“Have you seen the video?”_

_Clearing his throat, Jim shakes his head. “Have you?”_

_“No.”_

_That genuinely surprises him. If anyone has the pull to get the file, it’s Will._

_“I don’t want to,” Jim says. “Or maybe I do. I don’t know. She’s alive but, fuck.”_

_“Yeah.”_

_Will looks as dazed as Jim feels. Maybe Jim looks it too, he hasn’t been able to look at himself in the mirror in weeks. He has no idea what emotions he’s wearing as his mask, if he’s managing to conceal anything at all. Maybe the vastness of his confusion, the fear muddled by anger and guilt mired down with desperate longing are as plain a part of his attire as his jacket and ill-fitting slacks._

_“How’s CNN treating you?” Will asks him._

_Jim combs his fingers through his hair, straightens his tie. There are people watching them, and he’s awful at trying to ignore that fact. “Like a flight risk. They’ve put me in this apartment in Dupont Circle but I’m not allowed in the studio, or to report the news, or do anything at all, really. It’s maddening.”_

_“Well, as I’m sure you’ve read in multiple publications, my entire staff is on it’s way out.” This fact has left Will unscathed emotionally, as if he has come to accept ritual abandonment as routine; he picks up Jim’s drink from where he set it on the shelf._

_“You need a little more than an AP to fix News Night.”_

_“I have an assistant, a booker, a writer, and a few PAs,” he replies, unbothered by the indictment. “Now I’m looking for an EP.”_

_“Got any names on your list?”_

_Mac should have been first._

_“Just the one,” he says, looking pointedly at him._

_Oh._

_Definitely not._

_“No.”_

_“Why not?” Will asks, taking a long draw of the gin and tonic Jim was halfheartedly drinking._

_Besides the fact that he would kill him and that he’s vastly underqualified and perhaps, just maybe, it would not be wise to work out whatever collective Mac-related emotional trauma they have on cable news? That’s not what Jim says. What he does say is, “What’s the over-under on how long you’ve managed to keep an Executive Producer the past two years? Maybe sixteen weeks?”_

_“It’s actually fourteen,” Will corrects him, “not to brag.”_

_Jim realizes that he’s serious about this. “You’re insane.”_

_“And CNN is never going to let you work in broadcast journalism without signing a liability policy the size of the economy of a third world country ever again,” he counters, downing the drink with the practiced, graceful motion of a man who has occasioned alcohol dependence before._

_Squinting, he scrutinizes the look of mild desperation on Will’s face. Cocking his head, he asks, “The McHales won’t talk to you and I’m all you’ve got, aren’t I?”_

_“Yup.”_

_“I need a job,” Jim says on a tired exhale, more to himself than to Will. Closing his eyes, he tries to imagine what his future looks like at CNN, if he has a future at CNN. It’s murky, and unclear, and while there’s comfort in limiting himself to surviving day-to-day, he asks himself what Mac would do. He knows she would take Will’s offer, and not just because it’s coming from Will. Or maybe she would, but not for the reasons everyone would think. “I just need to keep telling myself that I need a job, so I can eat and not die. Why aren’t the McHales talking to you?”_

_Will plasters on an overly-casual smile. “Doesn’t matter, they’re talking to you.”_

_It does matter, but Jim is willing to table the discussion until a later date._

_“And I need a job,” he says instead._

_He moves to New York ten days later._

 

 

 

 

MacKenzie was always the brave one. At least in the ways that counted, and Will doesn’t care if it’s because she was reckless or an idiot or just completely ignorant of consequences, because most days he could cry for yearning. He wants her to take him by the hand one more time, and pull him along with her to do whatever brave, reckless, _right_ thing she’s going to do.

Along the way, in her year and a half in the Middle East, she left him twenty-odd voicemails, upwards of fifty emails. The emails are gone, and all but four voicemails he deleted summarily, on sight. And sat on his bed last night, chain smoking through the three hours it took him to listen to them. His hair reeks of smoke, he knows. He looks horrible, he knows. He feels horrible, in this new hell he’s constructed for himself, all four walls, all the bars and the lock, all of it MacKenzie.

_Let me out._

The altar, the shrine, the memorial, the whatever-the-fuck-it-is brings him to his knees. _I love you,_ he wants to say, but the words get stuck in his throat.

_I love you._

_I love you._

_I love you._

All gods are carnivorous; if you love one, it will devour you. To love a god is to experience a totalizing love, to be a supplicant to your own destruction. But it is a softer fate than the tense prolonged denouement of a life, the extended torture of hope. But that is the human condition - to love, to suffer, to live on anyway. To avoid, to deny, to inflict pain. But MacKenzie is no longer here. Living or dead, she does not reside here. He cannot hurt her. And more importantly, he knows he does not want to.

So he visits this place, at last.

For the first time since her capture, Will has dreamed of MacKenzie. In the half light, she cupped his cheek, a fond grin on her clever mouth. _Are you still,_ he began to say. Then, like a bulb shorting out, she vanished.

As gentle as her hands were in the dream, he brushes his fingers over the Peabody, and stands. Will brings flame to the wick of a candle.

Some lights never go out.

 

 

 

 

There isn’t enough make believe to get either of them through the day, all stores of denial depleted, used up on previous markers of the passage of time. Jim walks into Will’s office, hands shoved into his pockets, shoulders hunched. He could apologize. He won’t.

“Seven months today,” he says quietly instead.

“They blame us.”

Jim doesn’t ask who, does not offer judgement nor conciliation. Like the McHales could feel anything but spite for the man who sent their daughter and sister into a warzone, or the man who followed her there, and came home. He knows Will has faced the brunt of Lady McHale’s grief more than once.

“They’re not entirely wrong.”

It’s not just about the Peabody, or the blackout, or phone calls both sides stopped returning. 

Will drums his fingers on top of his desk. Eyes glassy and unfocused, he spares a momentary glance for Jim. “Then I guess it’s just us.”

A miserable sentiment.

But not entirely true.

“I don’t think it is,” he says, sitting in one of the chairs across from Will’s desk. With a sigh he stretches out, leaning back until he can look comfortably at the ceiling. Rolling his neck from shoulder to shoulder, he looks out through the glass to the bullpen - they know what today is too, piling on post-its and prayers. As if they can, through the sheer force of belief, make Mac manifest in the newsroom.

Will tracks his gaze. “She’d hate this.”

“Yeah, she really would.”

It’s the first time either of them have admitted it. All else being equal, Mac always preferred being _behind_ the camera and in the control room for a reason.

Some day, not this year and not the next, the ninth of November may be remembered as the feast day of one of the War in Afghanistan’s biggest martyrs. Some day, the media blackout will lift, either because MacKenzie has been released or because she’s come home in a box. But some day it will end, and the deluge of articles and blog posts and segments will come. The CNN special, the book, the interviews.

Will has his doubts that anyone will ask him about the woman he loved.

Why would they?

He picks up a pen, twirling it through his fingers. A distraction technique he learned in law school, for the opposition and for himself.

“When I was ten, I vowed I’d never get married, never have children,” he says, studiously not looking at Jim, not at the staff, not at anything in particular. “All because of my father. He’s cruel, and manipulative. And in my head he’s - he’s still bigger than me. But as a child he made us feel so small, like nothing. Less than nothing. And then there’s what he’d do our mother. She was so much smarter than him, but she never - never left. He would beat her bloody. When I was ten I broke a bottle across his face, to make him stop. I’m his only son, and when I was ten I vowed that it would end with me. Generations of abuse, boxed up and handed down, father to son, and it’d be buried with me.”

Swallowing hard, he musters the strength to make the briefest amount of eye contact with Jim. The trick of it has always been to make it sound like it matters like it’s nothing at all, like this is just some part of him that everyone knows.

Jim sits up a scant amount.  

“And then I met her. She made me good, and I loved her. Now I’m a rudderless ship. To them, she’s a goddess among mortals. A saint. But I was going to spend the rest of my life with her. Be the father of her children. Wake up with her every morning and go to bed with her at night. I loved her.” When was the last time he said that out loud? He can’t remember. “Everyday, I just expect her to walk through that door. And everyday I have to remind myself that she won’t.”

Curling his right hand into a loose fist, Jim looks at the stubs of his fingernails.

He doesn’t know what to say to that, the first honest thing Will’s said to him all year. But he has to try.

“Everyday when I wake up, my first thought is _where’s Mac?_ And everyday I just pray, not gone. Just those two words. _Not gone._ She was my best friend.” He attempts a weak smile. “What’s the going price for a goddess and a saint nowadays?”

Will knows.

He always knows, even if he pretends that he doesn’t.

“I spoke to Bill Keller at the _Times_ this morning - four prisoners in Guantanamo Bay and a cool twenty million dollars is what’s currently going around. The McHales and CNN received a credible message last month.” There’s a gentle kind of somberness in his voice. “Nothing since.”

But Jim remember’s last night threat.

“Will?”

“I’m not going to,” he assures him.

For whatever reason, Jim believes him now.

 

 

 

 

_The Marines on base either don’t bother sorting out their belongings, or assume that Jim is the rightful place for all of Mac’s things - when the international shipment arrives his first week in Mac’s old apartment, he ends up with all of her shit as well as his. He sends an email to her brother and oldest sister, asking what the family wants. There’s her laptop, which is encrypted. Clothes, which are mostly in tatters. Jewelry, but very little of it. A journal. And of course - her 2008 Peabody, the first of which sits on a shelf in her parents’ Belgravia home._

_The response to his email details a few objects - a coin necklace, her journal, a specific sweatshirt. The award._

_Jim means to send it, measuring the heft of it in his hand, the weight of all that he and Mac achieved together. What it meant, the evening she accepted the win and hung up the phone, throwing it aside to fling her arms around his neck, press a kiss to his cheek._

_“Couldn’t have done it without you, Jimmy.”_

_He means to wrap it in old newspaper, box it up. But her family already has the one, and he has nothing. So he makes excuses, until he can’t anymore, and her family only ever asks about when he’s going to ship it to them. And he makes excuses to himself, until he brings it to work, and lets it become something more than just the award._

_Lets Mac become something more than just a woman._

 

 

 

 

_One new voicemail, October 27, 2008, 10:09 PM._ “Hey Will. It’s me, again. I just thought… I don’t know what I’m thinking. That I have service here, I guess. Even with the satellite phone, out here it’s hard to make calls. I guess I wanted to call to let you that… that I’m still here, if you ever want to listen. I’m still gonna be here, talking to you, like I am right now. Always. And if you ever wanna talk, I can listen. So I guess until then… goodbye, Will.” _End of message._

 

 

 

 

_“We’ve lost the engine - fuck, fuck, Jesus Christ!”_

_Without warning, the helo keens, a metallic death cry. It lists violently, pitching them from their seats. Mac’s boots leave the floor, her body suspended midair like a ragdoll before she flies up against the ceiling, her headset crunching as her head impacts. She is dizzy, and disoriented, her lungs too startled to even form a scream._

_“Jim,” she whispers, adrenaline a bitter taste in her mouth._

_Seconds stretch out before her, each a yawning chasm to the next. It is not the idea of death that disturbs her, even one as violent and quick as this. Jim, still strapped down, manages to untangle himself halfway, reaching out with the hand not clinging to the camera. Bracing herself against the hull of the helicopter, she pushes towards him - their fingers meet, slick with sweat. Struggling, they cleave together._

_“Mayday mayday mayday - one thousand feet. Eight hundred. Five, three, two.”_

_The engine crackles, smoking, and the nose turns down. In an instant, a flash of white consumes the interior of the cabin, the bird rolling to its side again and with a dim pop they lose the door. The seconds collapse into one bright moment of realization, and then calm._

_Jim begins to slide out of his seat, losing his grip on her once and lunging to grab her again._

_The blinking red light of the camera looks at her._

_“Don’t let go!” he yells, his voice boyish from terror. “Mac, don’t let go, fuck! Don’t let go!”_

_The helo spins, chasing it’s own momentum. Her shoulder screams at the exertion to keep herself attached to Jim, and in the next moment - she lets go._

_Eyes closed, she allows herself to go limp. Vertigo tugs at her stomach as she plunges down to the ground, limbs sprawling. Then she is caught on the limbs of the tall evergreens, the branches and brambles and the quickness of it all cutting her skin. One catches her leg, another her elbow. She lands on her back, down in the underbrush._

_Her eyes open, but her vision clouds with black._

_Hours later, she hears steps on cracking twigs and dried leaves. In the distant sky are fingers of gold and orange. Later, she’ll wonder what might have happened had she not been concussed, not lying in the cold for hours in pain. If she might have hid, or at least hidden herself, instead of calling out._

_“Jim? Jim, is that you? I’m… I’m scared.”_

 

 

 

 

The eleven o’clock rundown is, some days, like holding court rather than a drudge match for whose story will land at the top of the hour. But only some days. Jim stands at the head of the conference table, leafing through the overnight book, paying the ongoing argument a sliver of his attention.

“Bernie Madoff, a hundred and fifty years in prison. His lawyers are asking for seven,” Gary offers, an index card in his hand. Jim decided against the story at _Bernie Madoff._

“Absolutely not,” Will concurs, leaning back in his chair to give himself enough room to put his feet up on the table, crossing them at the ankles. Folding his arms across his chest, he displays enough emotion to portray himself as mildly offended. Jim thinks he does fair enough of a job, considering. “I’m not giving him more airtime until he actually gets sentenced.”

Martin surveys the room, seeing if anyone else will offer something up to be shot down, before saying, “Michael Jackson’s autopsy.”

Scoffing, Kendra throws her notebook down onto the table.

“Wrong,” she says, enunciating the word low and long. “Air France Flight 477 was reported missing twenty minutes ago off the northeast coast of Brazil, with two hundred twenty-eight souls aboard. No mayday signals were given before they disappeared off the radar, and if they’ve gone down this will be the worst aviation disaster since September 11th.”

Jim stiffens, but catches himself, loosening the dread from his shoulders. He continues flipping the pages, the words blurring when he allows his eyes to slide out of focus.

“It just… disappeared?” Martin asks.

“Off the radar?” Gary looks up from scrolling through news alerts.

“Apparently,” Kendra answers.

“How can a plane just disappear?” Maggie asks.

“Sometimes things just disappear,” Jim answers, realizing a moment too late the curtness in his voice. Hands stilling over the pages of the book, he looks up, eyes flickering to Will for a scant second - there is no emotion on his face, only exhaustion. “What’s next?”

Tess shuffles through her notes, and pulls a ballpoint pen from behind her ear. “General Motors filed for bankruptcy. Early reports are saying Obama is willing to give them another thirty billion dollar bailout and GM will shed Pontiac, Hummer, Saab, and Saturn in addition to closing two to six thousand dealerships next year. Projected job loss is ten thousand.”

“Who can we get from GM on tonight?” he asks, and when her answer is silence, says, “Find out. And tell Sloan her five minutes are now ten.”

He feels his phone vibrate in his pocket before it begins to ring.

Without a single thought in his brain, he pulls it out of his jeans, answers the call, and puts it to his ear. “James Harper.”

“Jim. It’s me.”

His world hollows out, his gut congealing into one solid mass and then the bottom falls out, and he’s left feeling like someone with a big scoop has removed his viscera and chucked it out onto the table. Heart skittering, taking big thundering leaps, he feels his phone drop from his fingers and clatter onto the table. Will drops his feet down to the floor and sits up. Then, stands, rounding the table to where Jim’s phone lays face-up.

“I’m - I’m in Germany. Safe.”

_Her_ voice.

It’s raspy, and tired, and perhaps a bit shy, but it’s her voice.

Jim looks at Will, whose glassy countenance has been raptured by shock. He looks both frozen in place and like he might just start running for the Atlantic and start closing the thousand of miles between them in Germany.

Slowly, Jim lowers his hand from his ear, reaching for his phone.

“Hey?” she asks, tinny and distorted. “Are you still there?”

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. Charlie’s experiences are roughly paraphrased from the account of Air Force Captain Pete Peterson who was held at Hỏa Lò from 1966 to 1973. There are poor records of American journalists who went missing and were killed during the Vietnam War. The missing from the period, both military and not, still totals in the thousands.  
> 2\. Yes, this scene _was_ inspired by Outlast 2.  
>  3\. This is the real proof of life message said by ISIS hostage Kayla Mueller a month after her abduction. She was captured in Aleppo in 2013 and was held for two years before her death in 2015.  
> 4\. A media blackout was successfully imposed after the kidnapping of NYT reporter David Rohde by the Taliban in November 2008.


End file.
